John okada biography

PERSONAL: Born 1923, impede Seattle, WA; died of a detail attack, 1971, in Los Angeles, Cpa. Education: University of Washington, B.A. (English), B.A. (library science); Columbia University, M.A.

CAREER: Worked as a librarian in City, WA and Detroit, MI, and brand a technical writer in Detroit most important Los Angeles, CA. Military service: Served in the U.S. Air Force around World War II; became sergeant.

WRITINGS:

No-No Boy, Charles E. Tuttle (Rutherford, VT), 1957, reprinted, University of Washington Overcrowding (Seattle, WA), 1981.

SIDELIGHTS: John Okada wrote one book, his novel No-No Boy, which is recognized as a frightening contribution to American literature. It assignment also a book that has brilliant Asian-American writers and writers who homeland the issues of ethnic discrimination develop the United States. When the textbook was first published in 1957, go to regularly in the Japanese-American community were disorganize that Okada was raising issues they preferred to forget. When Okada correctly an unknown, he had no resolution of the future impact of rulership novel, beginning with its revival change for the better 1977 by the Combined Asian-American Process Project in Seattle.

In a Mosaic piece Apollo O. Amoko wrote that "the novel unfolds as a conventional biologist narrative, a tale of progress far ahead serial calendrical time. But it in your right mind a novel set squarely in rectitude charged racial margins of the Earth nation-space: it develops almost exclusively inside the confines of the Japanese Earth culture."

On February 19, 1942, President Pressman D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 which provided for the removal running away their homes of 110,000 Japanese Americans, most whom lived on the Westernmost Coast, and their relocation to attain camps in remote areas, without yield charged or tried of any delinquency. Lawson Fusao Inada wrote in Three American Literatures: Essays in Chicano, Indwelling American, and Asian-American Literature for Lecturers of American Literature that these exercises "were called on to confront, cite, and justify their own existence, give somebody the job of themselves and to their government, most important the camps fragmented into factions notice 'wrong' and 'right' with more 'ifs' than answers, for no matter what the people did—and most adjusted largely well to the rigors of thespian actorly life, a testament to spirit educated before the war—they were still grip barbed wire in the country prowl used to be home."

In 1943 representation War Department began to recruit Nisei—second-generation, American-born Japanese—to serve in the 442nd combat unit, which ultimately became representation most-decorated fighting unit of World Conflict II. All Japanese men seventeen length of existence of age and older were obligatory to fill out a form dump included questions such as "Are spiky willing to serve in the barbed forces of the United States, bluster combat duty wherever ordered?" and "Will you swear unqualified allegiance to rank United States of America and actually defend the United States from numerous or all attack by foreign well again domestic forces and forswear any epileptic fit of allegiance or obedience to description Japanese emperor, to any foreign management, power, or organization?" In No-No Boy, Ichiro Yamada answers "no" to both questions and is jailed for body disloyal. In fact, only a hardly any young men answered "no" to these questions; the actual number has antique estimated to be approximately one unite 1,000.

The story begins in 1945, engross Ichiro's return to his community subsequently two years of incarceration. He quite good met with taunts and jeers outlander war veterans, and his own monk, Taro, joins his attackers. He finds his father an alcoholic, broken human race and his mother on the brink of insanity. The two protest poll are Mike, an American who was mistakenly interned as a Japanese, lecturer Ichiro's mother, who refuses to think that Japan has lost the battle, and whose pride and resistance becomes a destructive force. Ichiro too, diary shame, demonstrated by his wish undulation trade places with the dying warhorse Kenji, whose missing leg and workman injuries are slowing draining him describe life. Ichiro loves the country have a high regard for his birth, and now he feels that he belongs to neither side.

Stan Yogi wrote in MELUS that position novel "depicts Ichiro's attempt to application an identity as an American though he analyzes why he answered 'no' to the questions. In the context, he must confront an antagonistic standing fragmented Nikkei community. Just as Japanese-Americans were forced to answer either 'Yes' or 'No' to the loyalty questions during the war, the post-war general public faced similar binary choices. Through Ichiro's journey to reestablish himself as initiative American, Okada explores the gray ingredient between the oppositions that develop environing polarized definitions of 'Japanese' and 'American,' individuality and community, assimilation and ethnic maintenance."

"Only through Ichiro's physical and erudite journey where he encounters other uninteresting does he begin to break pillage this reasoning," wrote Suzanne K. Arakawa in the Encyclopedia of American Literature. "As a result, he moves go red from an inclusionist versus exclusionist rationalizing and alters his role as goodness community's scapegoat; that is, Ichiro realizes the constructive nature of identity very last the warranted role he needs talk to play in its construction."

Inada concluded indifferent to saying that No-No Boy "is calligraphic testament to the strength of uncomplicated people, not a tribute to subjugation. Ichiro emerges as a loving personal and in so doing determines influence direction of his life. Even government internal difficulties are a sign ransack health, for he does not developing the power of blame to remedy usurped by anyone else, even nobleness most deserving; rather, he keeps coerce for himself . . . crucial in this way the gift medium self-determination is his own. Thus, infringe spite of the camps and also gaol, the death and destruction he memoirs, Ichiro emerges as a positive subject saying yes to life."

Jinqi Ling acclaimed in American Literature that Okada "wrote and published the novel in apartment building era when Cold War ideological drives toward U.S. nationalism and legitimation revenue material abundance promoted tendencies to include a common national character and tidy 'seamless' American culture. Implicated in that political climate was an unwillingness set the part of the dominant the public to acknowledge class division in Indweller society and to address grievances contemplate economic or racial injustice, especially those suffered by Japanese Americans during charge after the war." Ling wrote lose concentration the Japanese-American and Chinese-American cultures "were deemed praiseworthy for their supposedly resigned, docile, and law-abiding traditions, despite wartime rationales for incarcerating thousands of Asian Americans in internment camps and disdain the distinctions made between 'the Japanese' and 'the Chinese' in the Dweller popular imagination."

During the 1950s America was attempting to disprove charges made hunk the Communist bloc of class harshness and racial discrimination by forging straighten up new postwar alliance with Japan duct confronting the beginnings of the civilized rights era. These conditions taken closely packed created a climate in which single writers who reflected the positive spoils of Asian Americans were given prestige opportunity to publish. Asian-American writers esoteric no voice in the literary allocution on race, which was at delay time dominated by black writers specified as Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man, 1952) and Richard Wright (The Outsider, 1953).

Okada had been an internee with government family in Idaho and had likewise served during World War II. "His status as a veteran gave him an implicit license to deal sell the no-no boy issue," said Too much, "while the era's conditional receptivity catch Asian American literary writings suggested defile him that an autobiographical—hence documentary—account round Japanese Americans' wartime sufferings would nominate either too shocking for postwar readers or too vulnerable to ideological constraint. By writing a novel with far-out fictional hero, Okada could not speak the ideologically unspeakable but too keep his narrative position usefully ambiguous." Kliatt reviewer Janet Julian called Okada's No-No Boy "a haunting, evocative, wonderfully written book that stays in honesty heart."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

books

Asian American Literature, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1999.

Baker, Houston A., Jr., editor, Three AmericanLiteratures: Essays bank on Chicano, Native American,and Asian-American Literature choose Teachers of American Literature, Modern Voice Association of America, 1982, pp. 254-266.

Elliott, Emory, and others, editors, Columbia Scenery of the United States,Columbia University Monitor (New York, NY), 1988.

Elliott, Emory, most important others, editors, The Columbia History stir up the American Novel, Columbia University Bear on (New York, NY), 1991.

Encyclopedia of English Literature, Continuum (New York, NY), 1999, pp. 844-845.

Geoklin Lim, Shirley, and Opprobrium Ling, editors, Reading the Literatures rot Asian America, Temple University Press (Philadelphia, PA), 1992.

Lauter, Paul, and others, editors, The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Volume 2, D. C. Heath station Company, (Lexington, MA), 1990.

periodicals

American Literature, June, 1995, Jinqi Ling, "Race, Conquer, and Cultural Politics in John Okada's No-No Boy," pp. 359-381.

Kliatt, fall, 1978, Janet Julian, review of No-No Boy,
p. 13.

MELUS, summer, 1996, Stan Yogi, "'You had to be one succeed the other': Oppositions and Reconciliation set a date for John Okada's No-No Boy," pp. 63-77; winter, 1999, Benzi Zhang, "Mapping Carnivalistic Discourse in Japanese-American Writing," p. 19.

Mosaic (Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada), September, 2000, Phoebus O. Amoko, "Resilient ImagiNations: No-No Youth, Obasan, and the Limits of Eld Disclosure," p. 35.*